There are many social media channels where people can spread baseless opinions about others, tag inappropriate photos, and otherwise mess with your reputation. If you're a blogger, your name stands for the quality and authenticity of your posts, apart from your personal and professional interest in having a clean and positive online reputation.

As Google says: "Your online identity is determined not only by what you post, but also by what others post about you—whether it is a mention in a blog post, a photo tag, or a reply to a public status update."

If you want to influence the way people see you online, it's important to understand that there are two basic techniques for managing your online reputation.

Constantly monitoring what people are saying about you and responding instantly when necessary.

Actively developing your reputation by creating "positive" content. Create a hub such as a personal landing page where people can easily find everything about you in a simple and compact format.

With those two techniques in mind, here are six simple yet effective tools that might help you to monitor what people say about you and to develop and influence your online reputation.

Me On The Web

Me On The Web is a personalized Google Alert that can be accessed directly from your Google dashboard when you're logged in to your Google account. Get notified whenever your name or email address is mentioned publicly online. To use Me On The Web, just log in to your Google dashboard and click "Set up search alerts for your data." It's as easy as that.

SocialMention

Another brilliant tool to track your name online is Social Mention. It's a social media search engine that searches blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and micro-blogging services. You can select the sources you want to search and employ email alerts or a personalized RSS feed to stay up to date.

Don't take it from me; here's the official description.

"SocialMention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you across the web's social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc."

Twitter search RSS feeds

Twitter is one of the most popular tools when it comes to conversation and as such, it deserves some special attention. Monitoring what people are saying about you on Twitter should be a basic task when it comes to managing your online reputation. There's no need to manually search it regularly when you can create a Twitter search RSS feed that will update each time your name is mentioned.

Take advantage of a clean and simple app for building awesome personal landing pages in minutes with DooID.

DooID sites are free and customizable, and they help you to manage your information—such as your bio, social networks links, your blog, and contact details—all in one place. Once it's created, you can provide one link where people can find out everything about you, ideally using a personal domain name like yourname.com.

WiseStamp

You can create an HTML email signature and automatically add it to your outgoing email with WiseStamp. Email signatures are effective tools when it comes to building your personal brand and provide an ideal starting point for influencing your online reputation with anyone you contact via email. Having a professional email signature is very important; it should include your full name, basic contact info, and a link to your main website or personal landing page. Like DooID, Wisestamp is a free service that's quick to set up and almost maintenance-free.

Knowem

Knowem helps you to secure your personal name or username on more than 590 social media services and websites. You'll hardly use any of the services you sign up for via Knowem, but assuring that your name or pseudonym will not be related to any undesirable content on those websites is worth the effort.

These are just a few of many monitoring services out there. Which do you use, and how do you use them for online reputation management? Please let us know in the comments section.